Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> I should look
> up what de St, Croix and Finley say about this. jks
> Finley (explicitly invoking stratification as opposed to class theory)
claims that the rationale in Rome was racism. I didn't find that
persuasive when I read the book many years ago.
I don't recall that, but I'll look it up. Anyway, the Romans enslaved ethnic Romans too, right?
> I can't remember whether
de St. Croix even raised the question of rationale.
A quick look doesn'ts hwo that he did, but it's a big book. (Class Striggle in the Ancient World -- those on the list who haven't read it should, this is one of the great works of historical materialism, well written, lots of fun).
> In reference to Athens (from memory here) several historians (Finley, Wood, several Wood cites) note that unlike other slave societies, in Athens there was a sharp distinction between free and slave -- i.e., the democratic revolution had wiped out the _degrees_ of subordination that one finds in other societies in which slavery existed. And several (still from memory, but I think this includes Finley) note that it was this sharp contrast between free & slave that grounded the Athenian "discovery" or "invention" of liberty.
Paterson says that slavery was so normal it was largely unquestioned until the democratic revolution of ancient Greece, and that the doubts about it were rather fragile, didn't spring up again until the Roamna Republic, then the early modern eara. See here David Brion Davis' Book on the historyy of slavery in modern times (nonMarxist, but very good).
> Is it Plato or Aristotle that suggests a "free" man would die rather
than be a slave, thus proving that slaves were by nature not "free"?
Don't know in the sense that I can't lay my finger on the passage, but it _has_ to be Aristotle -- Plato is quite clear that no one is _really_ a natural slave, it's just that hierarchy is necessary for social stability, so you need a story to justify it.
jks
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